


Cradle

by praycambrian



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Art, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, Museums
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25453312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praycambrian/pseuds/praycambrian
Summary: Nile takes a second, searching for words. It’s difficult. If there were words for it, it wouldn’t have to be a painting.Three months later, Nile and Copley have a conversation in an art museum.
Relationships: Nile Freeman & James Copley
Comments: 27
Kudos: 115





	Cradle

Nile finds James standing in front of _Le théâtre de Gérard Philipe_. 

“It figures you’d like this one,” she says, not unkindly.

“Why’s that?”

Nile takes a second, searching for words. It’s difficult. If there were words for it, it wouldn’t have to be a painting. “It’s like that history you showed us of all the good they’ve done, the four of them. The lines.” She draws them in the air. “Like—architecture, I guess. It only makes sense to us, but the whole thing’s sitting on top of it.”

James considers the painting again. When Nile appeared, his thoughts had rabbited to his daughter—safe with her school group the next gallery over—and now it takes him a second to come back to the canvas in front of him, its blues at once immediate and remote. 

“I don’t have another job ready for you,” James says.

“I know. I’m not here for that.”

There’s only one other option. “I don’t have the reports on me.”

She shakes her head. New box braids, their tips dyed lavender. Pauline had always relaxed her hair. 

“It’s not like that, man,” Nile says. “Let me just—look for a minute.”

They’re silent through the next gallery. A lot of Dutch still lifes. James doesn’t like them: their domesticity lush but artificial, like the falsity of hospital flower displays. Nile likes how solemn they are. All that visual weight—light, color, composition—on these small, plain things. 

Nile says things like, “I love the light in this, right there,” or “Look at the detail on the water.” James looks and looks and the more he looks, the more he sees. He’s not an artist. Pauline had insisted on it for their daughter, when she was little: modelling clay and markers, watercolors that still hung on the fridge. Once they’d found her scribbling crayon on the wall at toddler-height, her concentration something to behold, and Pauline had just laughed and sat down next to her and taped up a piece of paper so that they’d be able to take the art away for preservation without the wall coming down with it.

Sculptures stud the halls. Nile’s thinking about Andy’s Rodin. It’s still in the abandoned mine, dust cloth thrown over it carelessly, as if Andy doesn’t care. _It’s what time leaves behind,_ Andy had said. As if Nile didn’t know that. As if Nile’s family hadn’t fought tooth and nail to keep the scraps time had left them at all. They’re lucky. They have family pictures going back as far as the 1860s: a single albumen silver print, undated, of Samuel Freeman in his USCT uniform, solemn, Nell and Eliza and Henry beside him. It hangs at the top of her mother’s staircase, the head of a line of soldiers’ photos. Nile’s dad is at the foot. Her last visit home, she’d come in from watching New Year’s fireworks on the stoop and the light through the glass door had thrown a prism of color across his face like some kind of sign. 

“You seem to like this one,” James says. 

Nile comes back to her body, the work in front of her. _Plantation_ , a rainbow of stars quilted on a rippling white field. 

“Joe and Nicky are the reason I’m alive, did you know that?” Nile says. “I mean—they saved my life, but I’m talking about earlier. That picture you found of them in the Civil War, they fought with my great-great-great grandfather. He told stories about the soldiers who didn’t die pulling him off the field. His kids thought he’d been hallucinating angels. It comes up every Easter.”

“I didn’t know that,” James says softly. 

“How can I turn my back on doing something like that?” Nile says. “Being that person for someone else?”

James’s throat aches with sympathy and so to salt it he says, “I don’t like that you came here when my daughter’s around. Please don’t do that again.”

Nile clenches her jaw. “All right,” she says softly. “What do you have for me?”

“Everything’s in the file, back at my house.”

“The file has facts. I want to know how you think they’re doing.” 

James considers it. They move politely to the side to let a family look at a sculpture of a human striding forward, its muscles bunching behind and ahead of it like gold wings.

“Jordan’s taking it hard,” James says. “He went to the campus grief counselor. He spends a lot of time in the batting cage. If he’s anything like you, and it seems like he is, he’ll keep going long enough to get to the point where sometimes it isn’t the first thing you think of when you wake up. It’s just a long ways off, still.” 

“And my mom?”

“She’s survived a lot.”

“But.”

“That’s all,” James says. “I don’t have another word for it. She’s got church. Your cousins. Jordan calls her every day. I don’t know, Nile. I’ve never lost a child. I imagine it’s different.”

“Yeah,” Nile says. She has it on good authority. 

They sit on a bench facing a fountain in a sunken court. It’s cool and fragrant, the mist wafting over carefully arranged ferns and irises. The school group will be reuniting here in nine minutes, though Nile doesn’t know this, and James doesn’t know how to tell her. Nile’s still thinking of Booker, Booker’s face when he told her about his sons: skin thin in the firelight, his eyes casting up as if tracking a bird that wasn’t there. The others are acting like his one awful lie undercuts the rest of his truths, but Nile knows what she saw. 

Nile says, “Do you think I made the wrong choice?” 

James rubs his mouth. “I think, the longer we live, the better our decisions become. The more precise. As if you’re throwing darts, and each dart weighs a little more than the one before. Pulls itself a little closer to the center.” He looks down. “Ideally.”

“So, yes,” Nile says.

“I would give anything for another hour with my wife,” James says. “Yes.”

“But that’s what made you come after us. It’s why you handed Nicky and Joe over to be cut up like lab rats,” Nile says. James does not flinch. “I want to go home so much it feels like swallowing battery acid. But how do I know if that’s a good enough reason?”

A cloud passing over the skylight turns the court the color of moths. 

“It seems to me that there must be a point where you know enough as a human being to make a truly ethical choice,” James says slowly. “We do our best to teach morality, and yet there’s always some—tragedy that comes between us and the person we’d be without that tragedy. So is it merely a matter of accumulating enough sorrow, enough knowledge, that it ceases to be separate from you, and _that_ is the path to moral clarity? And if so, then why are our lives so bloody short?”

“It’s not about time,” Nile says. “I don’t have to tell you that it doesn’t take a whole lifetime to suffer enough for enlightenment. Or whatever you want to call it. That’s not what scares me.”

“Then what?” 

“One day, all I’ll have left of any of you will be just scraps. No matter how beautiful. Just artifacts in a museum, only there won’t be anyone to come in and look at them. Nobody for me to explain them to. Because I won’t have kids.” 

Nile’s hands have fisted. She uncurls them and stands up. “Sorry. I know you don’t want me here. It’s just I don’t have anyone else to talk to who understands what it’s like to live in _this_ world.”

“Nile, wait,” James says. 

She waits.

“My daughter and I are going for lunch after her school trip. You can join us, if you like.”

Nile smiles. It breaks his heart. 

“Thanks, Copley,” she says. “Maybe next time.”

Nile turns the corner. She’s out of sight by the time James’s daughter comes into view with her notebook in hand, beaming to see him.

**Author's Note:**

> As if this movie wasn’t already designed with me in mind, _they made Nile an art nerd!_
> 
> Credit to my one beloved for the idea to connect Nile’s last name to a freedman Civil War ancestor. 
> 
> The museum these two are wandering doesn’t actually exist, because the art collected there is in fact spread around the world. The painting James likes is “[Le théâtre de Gérard Philipe](https://www.musee-unterlinden.com/en/oeuvres/the-theatre-of-gerard-philipe/),” by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva; I was thinking of Dutch still lifes along the lines of work by [Jan Jansz. Treck](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/jan-jansz-treck); Nile is looking at “[Plantation](https://stories.artbma.org/a-secret-map-and-layers-of-meaning/),” by Elizabeth Talford Scott; and the sculpture is “[Unique Forms of Continuity in Space](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81179),” by Umberto Boccioni.
> 
> Title chosen from Elizabeth Talford Scott’s comments about “Plantation”: “That’s the mother of the stars in the center … the dipper of the sky … the cradle. All the stars go there first. Babies. They shoot and then they go out.”


End file.
